Designers can no longer afford to ignore one of the most economically and environmentally impactful industries in the world.
As an infrastructure, the livestock sector is a necessary spatial and sociotechnical system upon which society depends, yet rarely thinks about. The physical and symbolic concealment of animal production and slaughter is necessary in order to maintain its speed, scale and efficiency. Beast Mode challenges this paradigm by describing and visualizing the infrastructural and architectural manifestations of livestock and poultry production in the United States. In making visible the concealed spatial techniques and technologies of contemporary animal agriculture, the book highlights the extent to which our collective appetite for meat, eggs and dairy shapes cities, regions and ecosystems and as well as the human and non-human animals residing therein.